Cold Cold Water EP

With all the love we here at Pitchfork have showered on the Microphones lately, we\n\ thought it high time ...

With all the love we here at Pitchfork have showered on the Microphones lately, we thought it high time to let Mirah in on some action, too. You see, besides appearing on just about every Microphones release so far, Mirah (full name Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn) released an excellent collection of songs in 2000 called You Think It's Like This but Really It's Like This, which was produced by lead Microphone Phil Elvrum. And she's issued enough singles and comp tracks over the past couple of years to choke all of Calvin Johnson's kittens.

Now, gearing up for her sophomore full-length, Mirah drops a nice little EP on us called Cold Cold Water. When I first heard the title, the sick part of me was hoping for a cover version of the old country standard popularized by classic cowboy balladeer Marty Robbins. Such was not the case, but the title track does evoke Robbins in a strange way. It's a bombastic gunfighter ballad (of sorts), coming off not entirely unlike Björk on peyote having visions of the Old West.

And you'd think it was all completely tongue-in-cheek judging from the cover art, which depicts Mirah as a masked outlaw, ready to fire her handgun at who knows what evil, off-cover menace. Yet, taken on its own, the song is deadly serious, dark, and full of the kind of not-so vague sexual innuendos we've come to expect from Mirah. It starts with the lines, "I saddled up my pony right and rode into the ghostly night/ It was wide, wide open," accompanied by a simple guitar strum. Then, Phil Elvrum's panoramic, Morricone-esque production technique explodes onto the soundstage with swelling strings, huge crashing cymbals, mammoth tympani, and strikingly effective hoof-clopping sounds. Meanwhile, Mirah sings about (as far as I can tell) finding a lover and taking him away to "where the water's deep" to "make the air you breath so sweet." It gets kinda vague from there, but it's the discrepancy between Mirah's voice, which is intimacy incarnate, and the sweeping grandeur of the production and backing music that makes the song truly affecting. The dynamic creates a complex but beautiful irony that's intoxicating.

After the title track, there are three songs of admirable bedroom folk, played solo and recorded by Calvin Johnson (including a unadorned version of "Cold Cold Water"). Then, there's eight tracks of "excerpts": snippets from the Elvrum-enhanced title track singled out. First, the string section is heard all by itself, then guitar and background vocals, then drums and percussion, and so on. And it's amazing how a close listen to these snippets alter how you listen to "Cold Cold Water"; you hear all these little parts you missed the first time around. It turns the EP into more of a participatory experience, and it's an interesting way to fill up an EP without resorting to b-material, keeping focus on the main song and enhancing the experience of listening to it.

I'm not giving Elvrum all the credit here-- the songs are what hold the EP together-- but this kid is a genius when it comes to recorded sound. And judging from the sound of the EP's title track, he's put a lot more time and effort into the recording process of Mirah's forthcoming album, Advisory Committee, than he did for You Think It's Like This. With any luck, it will be Mirah's first exceptional release.